As college students, we’ve all endured years of countless mathematics courses that professors convinced us are practical and have been told numerous times that the knowledge gained from these classes will help us in our future. And if you’re anything like us, you’ve rolled your eyes each time you’re told once more about the practicality of these classes, as you only see how monotonous these calculus courses tend to be.
While we’ve all been required to take mathematics courses every year since we were in kindergarten and can all probably recall the pythagorean theorem, many of us have yet to take a class instructing us on the terms and processes relevant to maintaining our finances. While the mathematics formulas that we’ve learned over the years have helped us pass our classes and get into an esteemed college, many of these formulas will have no use to us in our time after college, when we will inevitably be in charge of maintaining our own finances.
This is where a mandatory personal finance class comes in. Due to a core curriculum established by certain colleges and universities, students are required to take certain statistics and calculus courses, which is perfectly acceptable. However, what may be even more useful than these mandatory courses is a course all students are required to take which would present them with all the knowledge they need in order to maintain their own finances after their college careers have concluded.
There are already many high schools around the country that offer personal finance classes to their students, an idea that colleges like Fairfield University should take into consideration. Seeing as college is typically an individual’s final step before entering the “real world,” it seems logical that students should be required to take a class in personal finance in order to be better educated when dealing with concepts such as mortgages and loans.
The idea of a mandatory finance class may sound daunting to some, especially those who don’t consider themselves to be particularly adept at dealing with numbers. It may be comforting to know that these personal finance classes already in place at many high schools are taught at an introductory level, assuming that students enrolled in the class know very little about their finances. Such a class wouldn’t be taught at the level of an accounting or finance class in the Dolan School of Business, but rather as a means of introducing students to financial concepts that may be foreign to them.
So while those calculus and statistics classes may be vital in instilling basic mathematical concepts in the minds of students, the implementation of a personal finance course of some sort at Fairfield is just as, if more, important, as it will allow students to be fully prepared to handle the financial hardships of life after college.
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